American Poets Continuum
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All Soul Parts Returned
by Bruce Beasley
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
When the Gnostic Gospels collide with new age spiritualism, the Oxford Happiness Test, and treatises on Buddhist practice, we know we're in the territory of a Bruce Beasley collection. Alternately devout and heretical, Beasley known for his intense and continuing soul-quest through previous award-winning books interrogates the absurdities, psychic violence, and spiritual condition of twenty-first century America with despair, philosophic intelligence, and piercing humor. Bruce Beasley is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Theophobia (BOA, 2012). The winner of numerous literary awards and fellowships, he lives in Bellingham, WA, where he is a professor of English at Western Washington University.
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Burning of the Three Fires
by Jeanne Marie Beaumont
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
2015 NEW MEXICO-ARIZONA BOOK AWARD WINNER! With wit, expertise, and common sense, Dave DeWitt shows you how to establish a successful microfarm by choosing the most profitable plants and animals to raise and learning to market and sell what you produce. His informative yet conversational style makes you feel you're talking with an expert you already know. Declared the "pope of peppers" by the New York Times, Dave DeWitt is one of the foremost authorities on chile peppers and spicy foods. A food historian and prolific writer, he is the author of over fifty books including gardening guides, food histories, and cookbooks. DeWitt is an associate professor in the College of Agriculture, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences at New Mexico State University, and co-producer of the National Fiery Foods and Barbecue Show, now in its twenty-sixth year. Dave lives with his wife in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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The Reindeer Camps
by Barton Sutter
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
A winner of the Minnesota Book Award in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, Barton Sutter's latest collection details life on the Canadian border, presents portraits of northern plants and animals, rejoices in marriage, and traces the ancient ways of Siberian reindeer herders. The late Bill Holm called it "unlike anything Sutter (or anyone else) has done before." Sutter's poetry reminds us that other cultures have survived for millennia by living closer to the ground. Born in 1949, Barton Sutter was raised in Minnesota and Iowa. He retired from the University of Wisconsin - Superior in 2011 and now lives in Duluth, Minnesota.
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The Naomi Letters
by Rachel Mennies
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Rachel Mennies embraces the public/private duality of writing letters in her latest collection of poems. Told through a time-honored epistolary narrative, The Naomi Letters chronicles the relationship between a woman speaker and Naomi, the woman she loves.
Set mostly over the span of a single year encompassing the 2016 Presidential Election and its aftermath, their love story unfolds via correspondence, capturing the letters the speaker sends to Naomi-and occasionally Naomi's responses, as filtered through the speaker's retelling. These letter-poems form a braid, first from the use of found texts, next from the speaker's personal observations about her bisexuality, Judaism, and mental illness, and lastly from her testimonies of past experiences. As the speaker discovers she has fallen in love with Naomi, her letters reveal the struggles, joys, and erasures she endures as she becomes reacquainted with her own body following a long period of anxiety and suicidal ideation, working to recover both physically and emotionally as she grows to understand this long-distance love and its stakes-a love held by a woman for a woman, forever at a short, but precarious distance.
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Let's Become a Ghost Story
by Rick Bursky
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Rick Bursky's latest poetry collection reaches into the peculiarities of human relationships with emotional accuracy, charm, and a touch of surrealism. In poems that channel memories of brief encounters and long-lost loves through imagination and half-recalled dreams, Let's Become a Ghost Story turns nostalgia inside-out to reveal the innate humor of our most intimate connections.
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A Season in Hell With Rimbaud
by Dustin Kyle Pearson
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
In pursuit of his brother, a man traverses the fantastical and grotesque landscape of Hell, pondering their now fractured relationship.
The poems in Dustin Pearson's A Season in Hell with Rimbaud form an allegorical travelogue that chronicles two brothers' mutual descent into hell. When the older brother runs off by himself, the younger brother begins roaming Hell's different landscapes in search of him. As he searches, the younger brother ruminates on their now fractured relationship: what brought them here? Can they find each other? Will their bonds ever be repaired?
In the tradition of Virgil, Dante, Milton, Swift, Shelley, Joyce, Sarte, and especially Arthur Rimbaud, Pearson leads his speakers on a speculative, epistolary journey through the nether realm inspired by Christian beliefs and tradition. Drawing on the works of French Symbolists and the literary traditions of the American South, A Season in Hell with Rimbaud guides readers through an intimate rendering of one brother's journey to find his lost and estranged brother, perhaps recovering a part of himself in the process.
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A Tinderbox in Three Acts
by Cynthia Dewi Oka
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Selected by Aracelis Girmay, A Tinderbox in Three Acts is at once elegy and exegesis, fact and invention. In her fourth poetry collection, Cynthia Dewi Oka performs a lyric accounting of the anti-Communist genocide of 1965, which, led by the Indonesian military and with American assistance, erased and devastated millions of lives in Indonesia. Under the New Order dictatorship that ruled by terror for over three decades in the aftermath, perpetrators of the killings were celebrated as national heroes while survivors were systemically silenced. Drawing on US state documents that were only declassified in recent years, Oka gives form and voice to the ghosts that continue to haunt subsequent generations despite decades of state-produced amnesia and disinformation.
In service of recovering what must not be remembered, A Tinderbox in Three Acts repurposes the sanitized lexicon of official discourse, imagines an emotional syntax for the unthinkable, and employs synesthetic modes of perception to convey that which exceeds language. Here, the boundary between singular and collective consciousness is blurred. Here, history as an artifact of the powerful is trumped by the halting memory of the people whom power sought to destroy. Where memory fails, here is poetry to honor the dishonored, the betrayed, the lost and still-awaited.
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Useful Junk
by Erika Meitner
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
A master of documentary poetry, Erika Meitner takes up the question of desire and intimacy in her latest collection of poems.
In her previous five collections of poetry, Erika Meitner has established herself as one of America's most incisive observers, cherished for her remarkable ability to temper catastrophe with tenderness. In her newest collection Useful Junk, Meitner considers what it means to be a sexual being in a world that sees women as invisible-as mothers, customers, passengers, worshippers, wives. These poems render our changing bodies as real and alive, shaped by the sense memories of long-lost lovers and the still thrilling touch of a spouse after years of parenthood, affirming that we are made of every intimate moment we have ever had. Letter poems to a younger poet interspersed throughout the collection question desire itself and how new technologies-Uber, sexting, Instagram-are reframing self-image and shifting the ratios of risk and reward in erotic encounters.
With dauntless vulnerability, Meitner travels a world of strip malls, supermarkets, and subway platforms, remaining porous and open to the world, always returning to the intimacies rooted deep within the self as a shout against the dying earth. Boldly affirming that pleasure is a vital form of knowledge, Useful Junk reminds us that our selves are made real and beautiful by our embodied experiences and that our desire is what keeps us alive.
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Caw
by Michael Waters
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
In passionate poems about sin, obsession, and mortality-an artist's infatuation with a doll, an interspecies relationship, an ex-lover whose presence lingers in recipes, ecclesiastical birds, and a sex toy holding a loved one's ashes-Waters delivers impeccably crafted narratives infused with his signature lyrical gestures. At the book's core is a sequence of twenty-five poems on aging, dementia, and caregiving, chiseled phrase by phrase toward unflinching and memorable closure. Caw is a brilliant, intimate and moving addition to Waters's body of work and may be his most powerful collection yet.
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Mother Country
by Elana Bell
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Mother Country examines the intricacies of mother—daughter relationships: what we inherit from our mothers, what we let go, what we hold, and what we pass on to our own children, both the visible and invisible.
As the speaker gradually loses the mother she has always known and upon whom she has always depended to early onset Parkinson's disease and mental illness, she asks herself: "How do you deal with the grief of losing someone who is still living?" The caregiving of a child to her parent is further compounded by anxiety and depression, as well as the pain of a miscarriage and the struggle to conceive once more. Her journey comes full circle when the speaker gives birth to a son and discovers the gap between the myths of motherhood and a far more nuanced reality.
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Field Notes From the Flood Zone
by Heather Sellers
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
From the frontlines of climate catastrophe, a poet watches the sea approach her doorstep.
Born and raised in Florida, Heather Sellers grew up in an extraordinarily difficult home. The natural world provided a life-giving respite from domestic violence. She found, in the tropical flora and fauna, great beauty and meaningful connection. She made her way by trying to learn the name of every flower, every insect, every fish and shell and tree she encountered.
That world no longer exists.
In this collection of poems, Sellers laments its loss, while observing, over the course of a year, daily life of the people and other animals around her, on her street, and in her low-lying coastal town, where new high rises soar into the sky as the storm clouds gather with increasing intensity and the future of the community-and seemingly life as we know it-becomes more and more uncertain.
Sprung from her daily observation journals, haunted by ghosts from the past, Field Notes from the Flood Zone is a double love letter: to a beautiful and fragile landscape, and to the vulnerable young girl who grew up in that world. It is an elegy for the two great shaping forces in a life, heartbreaking family struggle and a collective lost treasure, our stunning, singular, desecrated Florida, and all its remnant beauty.
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Diamonds
by Camille Guthrie
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Diamonds presents a woman in midlife on the edge. In hilarious and heartbreaking poems, Camille Guthrie writes about the trials and surprises of divorce, parenting, country life, and the difficulties and delights of being alone, looking at art, and falling in love.
Witty resilience abounds in these irreverent poems about grief and desire, in which the poet meditates upon gender roles, history, pop culture, and academia. Guthrie subverts and teases traditional forms in an elegy about Sylvia Plath's prom dress, a dating profile for Hieronymus Bosch, a sestina about beauty and power, with radical dramatic monologues in the voices of Madame du Barry, a Pict Woman, and more. Unlike Virgil, who refuses to guide this poet through her journey at midlife, Guthrie leads readers by the hand into a provoking, affecting journey of a break-up and a reconciliation with love.
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Clues from the Animal Kingdom
by Christopher Kennedy
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
In his fifth collection of poems, Christopher Kennedy sifts through the detritus of the past to uncover the memories, images, and symbols that shape an individual's consciousness. Looking to animals and their instincts for inspiration, drawing shape from the poet's Irish Catholic working-class roots, these prose poems transcend grief and depression by seeking humanity's place in the natural world.
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The End of Pink
by Kathryn Nuernberger
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Winner of the 2015 James Laughlin Award, Kathryn Nuernberger's The End of Pink is populated by strange characters-Bat Boy, automatons, taxidermied mermaids, snake oil salesmen, and Benjamin Franklin-all from the annals of science and pseudoscience. Equal parts fact and folklore, these poems look to the marvelous and the weird for a way to understand childbirth, parenthood, sickness, death, and-of course-joy.
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To Keep Love Blurry
by Craig Morgan Teicher
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
In support of tribal efforts to protect the Bears Ears, Native writers bear testimony to the fragile and essential nature of this sacred landscape in America's remote red rock country. Through poem and essay, these often-ignored voices explore the ways many native people derive tradition, sustenance, and cultural history from the Bears Ears.
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Refuge
by Adrie Kusserow
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Deeply cross cultural, humanitarian, political and global poems about how humans deal with suffering across the world. These are poems about cultures rubbing up against each other, war, refugees, child soldiers, spiritual refugees trying to find a home, and a mother who is witnessing these firsthand. Rare ethnographic poetry by a world traveling cultural anthropologist and human rights activist.
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All You Ask For is Longing: New and Selected Poems
by Sean Thomas Dougherty
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
For over twenty years Sean Thomas Dougherty has negotiated between modernist and avant-garde writing and more populist traditions that extend back to Walt Whitman. His subject matter ranges from basketball to Bjork, from blue collar workers to Biggie Smalls, from Luciano Pavarotti to women waiting at a diner outside a prison in Upstate New York. Selecting from the best of eight previous collections, this New and Selected reveals the powerful arc and development of Dougherty's writing and establishes him as a voice of dissent for the future. A former Fulbright fellow, Sean Thomas Dougherty works at Gold Crown Billiards in Erie, Pennsylvania.
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The Chair
by Richard Garcia
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
One of America's foremost prose poets, Richard Garcia's The Chair simultaneously takes place in the natural world and a speculative world rich in the fabulist tradition: historical figures roam like ghosts, time is pulled and twisted, and narrative spins effortlessly out of language. A core of autobiography grounds these poems that are rife with surprises uniting the mythic and the everyday. Richard Garcia's awards include an NEA, a Pushcart Prize, and the American Poetry Journal Book Prize. He teaches creative writing in the Antioch University Los Angeles Low-Residency MFA program and lives on James Island, South Carolina.
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Sharp Stars
by Sharon Bryan
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Sharon Bryan's fourth poetry collection blends such disparate subjects as biology, astronomy, sports, philosophy, and music to probe humankind's desire for spiritual, even physical, transcendence. From Charles Mingus to Charles Barkley, from Buddy Holly to Bishop Berkeley, no reference is squandered in Bryan's prodigious imagination. Sharon Bryan's awards include the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Discovery Prize from The Nation, and two NEA fellowships. She has published three poetry collections and edited Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life and Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition. She is a visiting professor of poetry at the University of Connecticut at Storrs.
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Transfer
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Dusk
where is the name no one answered to
gone off to live by itself
beneath the pine trees separating the houses
without a friend or a bed
without a father to tell it stories
how hard was the path it walked on
all those years belonging to none
of our struggles drifting under
the calendar page elusive as
residue when someone said
how have you been it was
strangely that name that tried
to answer.
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Slope of the Child Everlasting
by Laurie Kutchins
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Slope of the Child Everlasting sustains the lyric and imagistic sensibility of Laurie Kutchins' previous poetry collection, The Night Path (BOA Editions, 1997), while expanding on its exploration of the archetypes that anchor the heart and mind of her poetry. The characters in these poems evoke chaos and regression, as well as song, wonder, and the tenacity of the imagination. Laurie Kutchins is an associate professor of English at James Madison University in Virginia. She lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and spends her summers along the Wyoming-Idaho border. The Night Path won the 1997 Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions.
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Your Father on the Train of Ghosts
by John Gallaher
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is one of the most extensive collaborations in American poetry. Over the course of a year, acclaimed poets G. C. Waldrep and John Gallaher wrote poems back and forth, sometimes once or twice a week, sometimes five or six a day. As the collaboration deepened, a third "voice" emerged that neither poet can claim as solely their own. The poems of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts read as lyric snapshots of a culture we are all too familiar with, even as it slips from us: malls and supermarkets, museums and parades, toxic waste and cheesecakes, ghosts and fire, fathers and sons. Ultimately, these fables and confessions constitute a sort of gentle apocalypse, a user-friendly self-help manual for the end of time. G. C. Waldrep is author of Goldbeater's Skin (2003 Colorado Prize for poetry), Disclamor, and Archicembalo (2008 Dorset Prize). He has won awards from the Poetry Society of America and Academy of American Poets, fellowships at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony; and an NEA fellowship. He holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and teaches at Bucknell University. John Gallaher is author of Gentlemen in Turbans, Ladies in Cauls, The Little Book of Guesses (Levis Poetry Prize), and Map of the Folded World. His poetry has been included in The Best American Poetry series and numerous journals and anthologies. He co-edits The Laurel Review, GreenTower Press, and the Akron Series of Contemporary Poetics. He teaches at Northwest Missouri State University.
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Long Lens
New and Selected Poems
by Peter Makuck
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
From "Long Lens": Folding laundry, I can see our clothesline waving its patches of color like the flag of a foreign country where I had happily lived in a small clapboard house surrounded by pines. I can hear my mother in her strong accent saying she didn't want a dryer even when we could finally afford one-Our sheets won't smell of trees and sunlight anymore. Long Lens represents forty years of Peter Makuck's work, including twenty-five new poems. With precise language, Makuck's imagery evokes spiritual longing, love, loss, violence, and transcendence. His subjects include the aftermath of the 1970 killings at Kent State University; scuba diving on an offshore shipwreck; flying through a storm in a small plane; rescuing a boy caught in a riptide; and lucid observations of spinner sharks, a gray fox, a spider, and a pelican tangled in a fishing line.
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Ennui Prophet
by Christopher Kennedy
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
The poems in Ennui Prophet, Christopher Kennedy's fourth collection, range from deeply personal explorations of relationships with family and friends, to examinations of the political climate in the first decade of the millennium. Whether personal or public, Kennedy gazes through a slightly distorted lens to better see the world around us. Christopher Kennedy's previous book, Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA Editions Ltd., 2007) received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. He directs Syracuse University's MFA program in creative writing.
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Not for Specialists
New And Selected Poems
by W. D. Snodgrass
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Until the late 1970s, W. D. Snodgrass was known primarily as a confessional poet and a key player in the emergence of that mode of poetry in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Snodgrass makes poetry out of the daily neuroses and everyday failures of a man-a husband, father, and teacher. This domestic suffering occurs against a backdrop of more universal suffering which Snodgrass believes is inherent in the human experience. Not for Specialists includes 35 new poems complemented by the superb work he wrote in the Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Heart's Needle, along with poetry from seven other distinguished collections. from "Nocturnes" Seen from higher up, it makes its first move in the low creekbed, the marshlands down the valley, spreading across the open hayfields, the hedgerows with their tops still lit, laps the roadbed, flows over lawns and gardens, past the house and up the wooded hillside back behind us till only some few rays still scythe between the treetrunks from the far horizon and are gone. W. D. Snodgrass, born in Pennsylvania in 1926, is the author of more than 20 books of poetry, including The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (BOA, 1995); Each in His Season (BOA, 1993); and Heart's Needle (1959), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books include To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry (BOA, 2002), After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches (BOA, 1999) and six volumes of translation, including Selected Translations (BOA Editions, 1998), which won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award.
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Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line
by Sean Thomas Dougherty
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line is a powerful, grief-driven, deeply felt collection that finds the beautiful and the true, the little epiphanies that give our lives meaning no matter how ephemeral they might be.
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The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande
by Ray Gonzalez
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Known for his superrealism and magical images born of the imagery of the Chicano/South Western culture, Ray Gonzalez gives new imagery and intensity to the mystery and common miracles of that culture, the passionate reclamation of identity. Ray Gonzalez is a poet, essayist, and editor born in El Paso, Texas. He is the author of five books of poetry, including The Heat of Arrivals (BOA 1996), which won the 1997 Josephine Miles Book Award for Excellence in Literature, and Cabato Sentora (BOA 1999). He is the editor of twelve anthologies and serves as Poetry Editor of The Bloomsbury Review.
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Theophobia
by Bruce Beasley
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Theophobia is the latest volume in Bruce Beasley's ongoing spiritual meditation which forms a kind of postmodern devotional poetry in a reinvention of the tradition of John Donne, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot. Theophobia is structured around a series of poems called "Pilgrim's Deviations" and forms a deviant and deviating pilgrimage through science, history, politics, and popular culture. Beasley seeks the Biblical Kingdom of God among Dolly the cloned sheep, the wonders and horrors of extremophilic creatures living in astonishing intensities of temperature, robotic phone operators, and Wikipedia's explanation of the mysteries of the Holy Spirit.
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No Need of Sympathy
by Fleda Brown
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
No Need of Sympathy is an exceptionally wide-ranging poetry collection, touching on contemporary science, physics, family, politics, and the natures of poetry and reality. These poems, the eighth collection by Fleda Brown, ask huge questions; they zero in like a microscope on what's here, at hand. They are spoken with humility, great humor, curiosity, and a deep love of living.
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Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone
by Matthew Shenoda
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Weaving narratives of ancient and contemporary Egypt while exploring ecological shifts of the Nile Valley, Matthew Shenoda is a voice at the crossroads of the African continent and its diasporas. Amiri Baraka says, "Matthew Shenoda's poetry will open your mind to another world that exists inside and outside of your own." Winner of the 2006 American Book Award for his debut collection, Somewhere Else, Shenoda is a younger poet with his eyes set on the larger issues of history, politics, and culture. Matthew Shenoda lives in Los Angeles, California. He is on the faculty of the MFA program at Goddard College.
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The Keys to the Jail
by Keetje Kuipers
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
In the flattening California dusk, women gather under palms with their bags of bottles and cans. The grass is feathered with the trash of the day, paper napkins blowing across the legs of those who still drown on a patchwork of blankets. Shirtless in the phosphorescent gloom of streetlamps, they lie suspended. This is my one good life-watching the exchange of embraces, counting the faces assembled outside the ice-cream shop, sweet tinge of urine by the bridge above the tracks, broken bike lock of the gay couple's hands, desperate clapping of dark pigeons-who will take it from me?
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All Its Charms
by Keetje Kuipers
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
A luminous new collection from Keetje Kuipers, All Its Charms is a fearless and transformative reckoning of identity. By turns tender and raw, these poems chronicle Kuipers' decision to become a single mother by choice, her marriage to the woman she first fell in love with more than a decade before giving birth to her daughter, and her family's struggle to bring another child into their lives. All Its Charms is about much more than the reinvention of the American family-it's about transformation, desire, and who we can become when we move past who we thought we would be.
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The Tiny Journalist
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Internationally beloved poet Naomi Shihab Nye places her Palestinian American identity center stage in her latest full-length poetry collection for adults. The collection is inspired by the story of Janna Jihad Ayyad, the "Youngest Journalist in Palestine," who at age 7 began capturing videos of anti-occupation protests using her mother's smartphone. Nye draws upon her own family's roots in a West Bank village near Janna's hometown to offer empathy and insight to the young girl's reporting. Long an advocate for peaceful communication across all boundaries, Nye's poems in The Tiny Journalist put a human face on war and the violence that divides us from each other.
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Letters to a Young Brown Girl
by Barbara Jane Reyes
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Barbara Jane Reyes answers the questions of Filipino American girls and young women of color with bold affirmations of hard-won empathy, fierce intelligence, and a fine-tuned B.S. detector. The Brown Girl of these poems is fed up with being shushed, with being constantly told how foreign and unattractive and unwanted she is. She's flipping tables and throwing chairs. She's raising her voice. She's keeping a sharp focus on the violence committed against her every day, and she's writing through the depths of her "otherness" to find beauty and even grace amidst her rage. Simultaneously looking into the mirror and out into the world, Reyes exposes the sensitive nerve-endings of life under patriarchy as a visible immigrant woman of color as she reaches towards her unflinching center.
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Dresses From the Old Country
by Laura Read
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
In Laura Read's second poetry collection, the former poet laureate of Spokane, WA, weaves past and present together to create a portrait of a life in progress. As the speaker looks back on her life, she exists simultaneously as all the selves she has ever been: a lost child, a lonely adolescent, a teacher, a daughter, a friend, a wife, a mother-a woman continually shaped and reshaped by memory and experience. Deeply rooted in a particular time and place, Read's poems strip away the illusion of the passage of time as they reveal how we are all wearing "dresses from the old country."
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Next
New Poems
by Lucille Clifton
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Finalist, 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. "Clifton mythologizes herself: that is, she illuminated her surroundings and history from within in a way that casts light on much beyond."-The Women's Review of Books
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Flare, Corona
by Jeannine Hall Gailey
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Against a constellation of solar weather events and evolving pandemic, Jeannine Hall Gailey's Flare, Corona paints a self-portrait of the layered ways that we prevail and persevere through illness and natural disaster.
Gailey deftly juxtaposes odd solar and weather events with the medical disasters occurring inside her own brain and body-we follow her through a false-alarm terminal cancer diagnosis, a real diagnosis of MS, and finally the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. The solar flare and corona of an eclipse becomes the neural lesions in her own personal "flare," which she probes with both honesty and humor. While the collection features harbingers of calamity, visitations of wolves, blood moons, apocalypses, and plagues, at the center of it all are the poet's attempts to navigate a fraught medical system, dealing with a series of challenging medical revelations, some of which are mirages and others that are all too real. In Flare, Corona, Jeannine Hall Gailey is incandescent and tender-hearted, gracefully insistent on teaching us all of the ways that we can live, all of the ways in which we can refuse to do anything but to brilliantly and stubbornly survive.
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Buffalo Girl
by Jessica Q. Stark
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
In these hybrid poems, Jessica Q. Stark explores her mother's fraught immigration to the United States from Vietnam at the end of war through the lens of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale.
Told through personal, national, and cultural histories, Buffalo Girl is a feminist indictment of the violence used to define and control women's bodies. Interspersed throughout this hybrid work are a series of collaged photographs, featuring Stark's mother's black-and-white photography from Vietnam beautifully and hauntingly layered over various natural landscapes-lush tropical plants, dense forests, pockets of wildflowers. Several illustrations from old Red Riding Hood children's books can also be found embedded into these pieces. Juxtaposing the moral implications of Little Red Riding Hood with her mother's photography, Stark creates an image-text conversation that attends to the wolves lurking in the forests of our everyday lives. Opening the whispered frames around sexuality and sex work, immersed in the unflattering symptoms of survival, Buffalo Girl burgeons with matrilineal love and corporeal rage while censuring the white gaze and the violence enacted through the English language. Here is an inversion of diasporic victimhood. Here is an unwavering attention to the burdens suffered by the women of this world. Here is a reimagination, a reclamation, a way out of the woods.
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Nomenclatures of Invisibility
by Mahtem Shiferraw
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Through a lens simultaneously historical and political, Mahtem Shiferraw attends to personal and collective experiences of migration, motherhood, and immigration's complicated notions of home.
In Nomenclatures of Invisibility, Shiferraw calls us to carve out space for the multitudes of selves we carry when we migrate across boundaries of body, language, and state. Through a decolonial poetics, giving name to everything in her path from the Italian colonization of Eritrea (and failure to colonize Ethiopia) to her beloved eucalyptus tree, she blurs physical and temporal borders, paying homage to ancestors past, present, and future. Shiferraw writes unapologetically against erasure, against invisibility, instead creating a space that holds grief lovingly, that can tend to the wounds held and held in the endlessly-traveling body. Brilliant with abundance and texture, Shiferraw's poems dismantle the empire's sterility of language, both historical and present.
In Nomenclatures of Invisibility, Mahtem Shiferraw builds a home within her poems, attentively naming those who exist within them out of invisibility and into the radiant light: "We walk in unison too: our backs bending at once,/ our arms breaking, our abdomens kicked into silence, thighs bleeding. Through this I ask; am I still lit? And they, again...what else would you be-"
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True Faith
by Ira Sadoff
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
The poems in True Faith are earthy, lyrical, honest, and empathic in a style that is both gritty and urbane. With wry humor, Ira Sadoff's latest collection addresses family, faith, and the quiet joys of aging.
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The Dug-Up Gun Museum
by Matt Donovan
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Traveling the nation, Matt Donovan examines the paradox of a country plagued by gun violence yet consumed with protecting the right to bear arms.
Matt Donovan's The Dug-Up Gun Museum confronts our country's obsession with guns to explore America's deep-seated political divisions and issues linked to violence, race, power, and privilege. Taking its title from an actual museum located in Wyoming, this collection of poems interrogates our country's history of gun violence, asking questions about our fetishization of weapons, how mass shootings and the killing of unarmed civilians by police have become normalized, and the multitudinous ways in which firearms are ingrained in our country's culture. Much like the poet himself, Donovan's poems are dynamic and constantly in motion as he explores the ways in which capitalism and its relentless stream of content have led to a collective desensitization in the face of violence. In turns harrowing, elegiac, and ironic, set in locations ranging from Cody to Chicago, from Las Vegas to Sandy Hook, The Dug-Up Gun Museum probes America's failures, bizarre infatuations, and innumerable tragedies linked to guns.
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The Terrible Stories
by Lucille Clifton
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
The long-awaited tenth collection of poetry from the Shelley Memorial Prize-winning poet Lucille Clifton.
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Year of the Dog
by Deborah Paredez
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
In the tradition of women as the unsung keepers of history, Deborah Paredez's second poetry collection tells her story as a Latina daughter of the Vietnam War.
The title refers to the year 1970-the "year of the Metal Dog" in the lunar calendar-which was the year of the author's birth, the year of her father's deployment to Vietnam with a troop of Mexican-American immigrant soldiers, and a year of tremendous upheaval across the United States. Images from iconic photographs and her father's snapshots are incorporated, fragmented, scrutinized, and reconstructed throughout the collection as Paredez recalls untold stories from a war that changed her family and the nation.
In poems and lamentations that evoke Hecuba, the mythic figure so consumed by grief over the atrocities of war that she was transformed into a howling dog, and La Llorona, the weeping woman in Mexican folklore who haunts the riverbanks in mourning and threatens to disturb the complicity of those living in the present, Paredez recontextualizes the historical moments of the Vietnam era, from the arrest of Angela Davis to the haunting image of Mary Ann Vecchio at the Kent State Massacre, never forgetting the outcry and outrage that women's voices have carried across time.
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Rue
by Kathryn Nuernberger
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
In this fiercely feminist ecopoetic collection, Kathryn Nuernberger reclaims love and resilience in an age of cruelty.
As the speaker-an artist and intellectual-finds herself living through a rocky marriage in conservative rural Missouri, she maintains her sense of identity by studying the science and folklore of plants historically used for birth control. Her ethnobotanical portraits of common herbs like Queen Anne's lace and pennyroyal are interwoven with lyric biographies of pioneering women ecologists whose stories have been left untold in textbooks.
With equal parts righteous fury and tender wisdom, Rue reassesses the past and recontextualizes the present to tell a story about breaking down, breaking through, and breaking into an honest, authentic expression of self.
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Brand New Spacesuit
by John Gallaher
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
In Brand New Spacesuit, John Gallaher writes with honesty, humor, and tenderness about caring for his aging parents. These poems offer snapshots of the poet's memories of his adoption and childhood, his father's heart attacks, his mother's progressing Alzheimer's disease and stroke, raising his own children, and his reflections on the complex mysteries of the universe within everyday moments. With exquisite attention to detail, Gallaher captures the losses, anxieties, and possibilities that come with caring for one another.
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The Second O of Sorrow
by Sean Thomas Dougherty
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Sean Thomas Dougherty celebrates the struggles, the dignity, and the joys of working-class life in the Rust Belt. Finding delight in everyday moments-a night at a packed karaoke bar, a father and daughter planting a garden, a biography of LeBron James as a metaphor for Ohio-these poems take pride in the people who survive despite all odds, who keep going without any concern for glory, fighting with wit and grace for justice, for joy, every god damned day.
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Sky Country
by Christine Kitano
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Christine Kitano's second poetry collection elicits a sense of hunger, an intense longing for home and an ache for human connection. Channeling both real and imagined immigration experiences of her own family, her grandmothers, who fled Korea and Japan; and her father, a Japanese American who was incarcerated during WWII, Kitano's ambitious poetry speaks for those who have been historically silenced and displaced. Christine Kitano's first collection of poetry, Birds of Paradise, was published by Lynx House Press. She lives in Ithaca, NY, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing, poetry, and Asian American literature at Ithaca College.
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In Country
by Hugh Martin
Part of the American Poets Continuum series
Hugh Martin's second full-length poetry collection moves within and among history to broaden and complicate our understanding of war. These poems push beyond tidy generalizations and easy moralizing as they explore the complex, often-tense relationships between U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians. The speaker journeys through training to deployment and back again, returning home to reflect on the soldiers and civilians-both memories and ghosts-left behind. Filled with recollected dialogue and true-to-life encounters, these poems question, deconstruct, examine, and reintegrate the myths and realities of service.